the crosseroads

Booting a ZFS Root via UEFI on Debian

posted on Feb. 9, 2016 (14 min. read )

I’m playing with ZFS on Linux using Debian jessie (and eventually stretch). I decided I really wanted to use ZFS for everything, including /boot/grub and swap space. In addition, I wanted to boot using UEFI. This is how I did it.

Crashplan on SmartOS

posted on Dec. 4, 2015 (5 min. read )

It’s taken quite a while, but I have replaced my home server’s OS with SmartOS. (It was previously running Windows with Hyper-V. Look for a future blog post about the migration in general.) With the previous layout, I had a single Linux guest called “nas” that was my file server, but did triple-duty running Plex and the CrashPlan client as well. After migrating most of my other Hyper-V guests to OS zones where possible, it was time to tackle getting a CrashPlan zone going. Unfortunately, Code42 retired Solaris as a supported platform a while back. However, since it’s “just Java”, I figured the Linux package might work in an LX-brand zone. Turns out, it works quite well–with one minor caveat.

Blog Cleanup

posted on Nov. 15, 2015 (1 min. read )

Anything older than 2014 got moved to an “archive” section. You probably don’t want to go there, but if you do, the link is on the left. I also migrated the site to Hugo. Had I done that recently, it might have made a good blog post. Alas, it is not to be.

Blog moved to Google App Engine

posted on May. 31, 2014 (1 min. read )

I’ve been playing with Google App Engine for a project lately, and I decided to give it a shot for hosting this blog. Since Octopress is just a bunch of static files, there isn’t much fiddling to do at all to make it work. In fact, simply copying the app.yaml file from this Github repository was all that was needed. Neat!